Console OS Kickstarter campaign hopes to bring Android to your PC

Google Android may be developed first and foremost as an operating system for smartphones and tablets. But folks have been figuring out how to run Android on PCs for years, sometimes with mixed results.

This isn’t the first version of Android to support Intel chips. In fact, Google’s Android software officially supports Intel chips like the ones found in recent low-cost tablets and smartphones, and the Android-x86 project has been porting Android to AMD and Intel platforms for several years.

But the folks behind Console OS say their software is designed to support common PC hardware with support for OpenGL ES 3.0 graphics, Miracast wireless display technology, and more.

Console OS can run as a standalone operating system, or you can install it on multi-boot systems so you can switch between Windows and Android.

Unfortunately, Console OS isn’t Google certified, which means it’ll lack the Google Play Store. Instead it’ll have its own app store as well as the Amazon Appstore… and support for importing apps you’ve purchased from Google Play on other devices.

The basic operating system will be available for free, while Console OS Pro adds extra features for a fee. Eventually you’ll need to pay for a $20 per year license to use the Pro version, but a $10 Kickstarter pledge gets you the OS plus free lifetime updates.

Pro features include support for toggling between Android and Windows without rebooting, WindowFlinger for running Android apps in Windows, and DVR support, among other things.

The team says they’re supporting 25 PCs at launch, including tablets, notebooks, and 2-in-1s such as the Asus Transformer pad T100, Dell XPS 11, 12, 13, and 15, Dell Venue 8 Pro and Venue 11 Pro, and several Lenovo, Sony, and Toshiba systems.

Console OS sounds like an interesting project… but it also doesn’t sound all that different from what we’ve seen from Android-x86, Bluestacks, and other efforts to bring Android and Android apps to Windows PCs.

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Yeah I liked the notion of a haswell i7 Android, but lately I’ve been playing with Android-x86 and I’ve got a Tronsmart S89 with a 2ghz ARM processor and both run all the Android I’ve tried apps really well. Unless Android starts running serious, processor intense applications, I don’t see much value in this. I was a big fan of the original product, because the available processors for Android were quite a bit underpowered at the time, and I hadn’t fiddled with the Android-x86.

No matter how hard I try though, I cannot make Android into a productive OS. It does nothing for me except keep my kids busy with games…. and other media consumption. A haswell powered desktop OS is super speedy and way more featured, hands down.

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A major goal of Console OS is to scale Android up and get games doing more than what Android does on tablets and smartphones today. Our vision is one app code base that spans from smartwatch to supercomputer.

You have to create that ecosystem that brings OEMs to the table or the app developers won’t see the marketplace to complete those last-mile enhancements.

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I would much rather have something like bluestacks so I could run Android apps like widgets on my Linux computers. Something that would be stable and run smoothly would be nice.

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Console OS Pro lets you run Android apps in windowed mode, so you get that experience in our Pro version. The standard version of Console OS allows for running two Android apps side-by-side.

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You can’t run cutting-edge Android games in Linux. Or even not cutting edge games. Even with a faster GPU and CPU than a tablet can offer, running Android native is the only way to do it. That’s why we focused Console OS on dual-boot.

Especially as OpenGL ES 3 and OpenGL 4 enter the mainstream Android ecosystem, virtualization and emulation will fall further and further behind, especially on x86 tablets where there’s the most potential.

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There’s a comparison chart at ConsoleOS.com that shows the advantages versus other options like Bluestacks. Check it out, decide for yourself.

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